1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and a method to detect persistent congestion in buffer constrained environments.
2. Description of the Related Art
An ideal network should be able to transmit useful traffic directly proportional to traffic offered to the network. Nonetheless, network operations diverge from an ideal network for a certain number of reasons which are all related to an inefficient allocation of resources in an overloaded environment. Congestion in packet networks may occur for example at routers where flows converge from different sources. As complicated networks may consist of numerous different end systems (sources and receivers), routers, and links, it is usually impossible to match their capacities perfectly. Accordingly, congestion will occur where more packets are received than can be handled.
Various ways of handling congestion are known. At the simplest level, buffering is provided to handle temporary overloads. For longer overloads, flow control mechanisms are provided, to enable downstream elements to cause a source of data packets to reduce the rate of sending packets. For instance, in the Internet, congestion is typically identified based on static queue thresholds or via a statistical average of a queue size (e.g., exponentially weighted moving average or EWMA). However, this type of identification is appropriate for systems with ample queuing, not when buffering resources are scarce.
An effective congestion mechanism is needed to offer fair packet delivery with full utilization of switch capacity. Accordingly, a congestion mechanism is needed for systems including small buffers and limited memory that will trigger congestion detection when persistent congestion occurs rather than for transient congestion events.